Know Whom You Worship (February 29, 2004)

Bear with me a few moments in the following thought experiment.

Suppose we ask a man if he is a Christian and he says, “Absolutely. I believe in Jesus Christ. He is my Savior and Lord. He died for my sins. He lives in my heart, and helps me to do right. I will see him in heaven."

Certainly this man is an orthodox Christian - at least as far as his verbal profession would indicate. But suppose now we say to him, "Tell me something about Jesus. When did he live?"

"About 150 years ago."

Well, that's off by more than 1800 years, but it is not an essential point - some people are fuzzy about dates.

"How did he die?"

"Bullet to the head."

Well, that is really odd - we know that Jesus was crucified.

"What can you tell me about his life?"

"He was a man who preserved our nation through its most troubling years during the Civil War as our 16th president."

Ah - now we see the problem. This man is actually describing Abraham Lincoln, but has assigned to him the name "Jesus Christ" and has given him religious significance by saying he "died for my sins" and "lives in my heart." Can we still call this man a Christian? No - but not because he rejects or refuses to believe in Jesus. He does believe in Jesus - he told us so himself. The reason he is not a Christian is because practically all his facts about Jesus are wrong. He may call himself Christian, but the content of his belief indicates that he’s really a “Lincolnian.”

My point is simply that it is important for all of us who call ourselves Christians to get our facts right about Jesus. If we let falsehoods creep into our understanding of him, then there will come a point of critical mass when we are no longer loving and worshiping Christ but rather some perversely distorted mental image of him. Rigorous Bible study and careful theological reasoning accompanied by prayer and the Holy Spirit’s direction will help us form right thoughts about Christ so that we can worship him as he is and not as we (perhaps falsely) imagine him to be.

That goes for God the Father and God the Holy Spirit as well. If we believe wrong things about God we will be idolaters worshipping a false deity. This thought occurs to me when I hear of people turning away from God in anger when they do not get a “yes” answer to their prayers. I think, “What kind of God were they praying to in the first place? Were they praying to the sovereign and holy Lord of all creation, or to some glorified genie in a bottle?” The “god” that some people address in their prayers bears no more resemblance to the real God than Abraham Lincoln does to Jesus Christ!

Here is another example. Some years ago I received news of an adulterer who claimed that he was doing God’s will by divorcing his faithful wife. I wrote the beast saying that, despite his claims, he was not a Christian. I said, "Whatever 'faith' you have is worthless, because you place it in a God who condones your plans to dismiss your wife, and that God does not exist. The one true God, the one I worship and fear, pledges to damn unrepentant, vow-breaking lying adulterers like yourself.”

The God who exists is the one whom we know through Scripture, and there is no other God. The Jesus who is our Savior is the one whose life and teachings are recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Knowing and learning the sacred texts and thinking rightly about them is no mere academic exercise. It is a holy thing to do. Through the Bible we know God, the real God, and thus protect ourselves from blurred, false, misleading and even idolatrous images of him.